Screen Junkies came out with an honest trailer for Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but they had one big problem. Their humor generally rests on snarking about the nonsensical, implausible, poorly written, or just dumb aspects of a movie, but The Winter Soldier was actually good. Good movies are good for the universe, but bad for critics who are trying to be funny. They admitted, "This was hard, guys," but they still gave it the old college try.

"You weren't that impressed by the first movie, he wasn't your favorite Avenger. Now, get ready for the sequel that made everyone say, 'Holy sh*t, who knew Captain America kicked so much ass?'"

Although The Winter Soldier stood on its own merits as a solid thriller/action movie of above-average intelligence, arguably its greatest accomplishment was finding a way to make Captain America interesting, as he generally earns the dubious distinction of being just as milquetoast and earnest as Superman, but less powerful. So in light of the unexpected success of The Winter Soldier, Screen Junkies rightly came to this groundbreaking conclusion:

[Credit: Screen Junkies]

Some of their jokes were understandably lame (calling Hayley Atwell's character a "GILF" is a low point), but they made several good points along the way. First, that Captain America had absolutely no reason to trust Black Widow, who has proven herself dishonest and untrustworthy time and time again, or Falcon for that matter, as they had literally just met. Also, the HYDRA reveal was a shocking twist partially because there had been little to no foreshadowing in previous Marvel films. And finally, no one ever actually dies in the Marvel universe (Coulson, anyone?). In this movie alone, Bucky turned out to still be alive, Dr. Zola was still alive, and Nick Fury was still alive. Not that anyone thought the latter could really be dead, since Marvel would never kill off Samuel L. Jackson before he could appear in another Avengers film.

They only briefly mention the fact that the "Bucky is alive" reveal was "run into the ground," but I thought this was probably the most pedestrian part of the film. It was entirely predictable, storyboarded from the moment they "casually" remind the audience who Bucky is. The plotline in general was not always handled well, and at times felt emotionally manipulative, even cheesy.

They had a few continuity questions for the Marvel universe that they freely admitted were nitpicky, including:

Why wasn't Nick Fury wearing the bulletproof vest that saved his life in Avengers?

Why didn't Iron Man find out about HYDRA when he decrypted S.H.I.E.L.D.'s files?

How does an organization that employs thousands of people hide the fact that half of their employees are part of a Nazi death cult?

If S.H.I.E.L.D. had the Tesseract all along, then why didn't Red Skull/HYDRA use it to take over the world before now?

Why didn't they try to kill Nick Fury before he saved Iron Man, resuscitated Captain America, and assembled the Avengers?

I can't claim to be a Marvel fanatic myself, but one very hardcore Youtube commenter with the handle "romxxii" gave very thorough responses to these nitpicks:

"The Hydra in SHIELD plot was developed in Agents of SHIELD. So yeah, not really in the films, but still in-universe.

Winter Soldier was using specialized sniper rounds. Fury's vest only stopped small arms fire in Avengers.

Tony did find out about Hydra; we just didn't know it. I'm pretty sure Phase 2 (using the Tesseract to power a giant space missile) was a Hydra plan.

Good HR software?

Zola explained that Red Skull's outright conquering was ineffective, and that people would fight less if you made them think they wanted to be ruled.

Pierce thought he could still turn Fury, or at least, as he was, use him in place. After all, Pierce knew Fury's take-no-prisoners mentality aligned with Hydra's goals for the most part."